In your version of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the actors Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan are sharing the roles of Faustus and Mephistophilis. What led you to take that approach?If you conjure a demon, to some extent that demon is going to represent a side of yourself. I always felt the two characters were very much connected – that Mephistophilis didn’t really exist without Faustus, and the other way round. Mephistophilis is Faustus’s own particular demon rather than one that exists independently of his imagination.

Doctor Faustus review – devilish ritual and punk cabaret at the RSC

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At the start, the actors strike matches to see who will play which role that night. Faustus is portrayed by the actor whose light goes out first. It’s a thrilling moment and reinforces the play’s sense of ritual and summoning.The historian Suzannah Lipscomb came into rehearsals and talked about how theatre performance itself around Marlowe’s time was a kind of summoning. The first few performances of Doctor Faustus were extremely dangerous because it was illegal to summon the devil – and was punishable by death. Watching it on stage, there is the element of not knowing whether or not you might actually summon the devil when you re-enact it! There’s something interesting about the theatre performance itself as a ritual.

With two actors alternating the lead roles, how did you go about rehearsing the play?We shared everything quite openly. We never had a rehearsal where all three of us weren’t present at the same time. I suppose because I wanted to eliminate any possibility for competition or comparison – not that it would have happened between these two incredibly generous actors. I think that openness really helped – there was a cross-pollination across the four versions of the characters. I’d never done anything like it before and neither had they. We rehearsed a scene one way around, discussed it, did it again a couple of times and then swapped and did it the other way. Eventually, they both needed longer stretches of time concentrating on just the one character, so we did that.

Directors of Doctor Faustus have two versions of the play to choose from – an “A text” from 1604 and a “B text” from 1616. Which have you used?I lifted bits from both and cut it all quite substantially. I cut comedy scenes and wanted to focus on making it as dark as possible, streamlining the journey of Faustus. Both texts are dubious in origin. There’s an ongoing debate about whether both have a collaborative element. There’s evidence that the A text definitely is written by more than one person. The B text is a production text so it’s gone through a censorship process. They’re both slightly unreliable sources, which gives a director a bit of freedom to relate to them in a different way from a Tennessee Williams or whatever, where you know that everything on the page is a very accurate representation of the author’s intentions.

Productions of Doctor Faustus often struggle to balance the play’s dark thrills with what you could charitably call its “challenging” comic sequences.At the best of times, Elizabethan comedy is extremely difficult to pull off. I think if you’re offsetting it against something quite complex, dark and brutal, it’s even harder. For the story I wanted to tell, those scenes just really didn’t interest me – partly because they don’t feature Faustus and I wanted to make sure that he’s in every scene.

You use a cabaret style for the episode with the Seven Deadly Sins.In the A text, the seven deadly sins appear without any real dramaturgical necessity, as a bit of entertainment. I restructured the text because I wanted to make sure that they were used to convince Faustus that he is making the right decision, so they had to represent something that he really wanted but wouldn’t have experienced in his life as an academic: they had to be seductive, exciting, thrilling – overwhelming in some sense for him as a character. When I started working with Orlando Gough, the composer, we talked a lot about Tom Waits and that kind of grotty, sexy quality in some of his music … I also looked at some Duckie-style cabaret. It felt like it needed to be something fun, dangerous and seductive without being slick.

Hell felt very real for the play’s original audiences but it is much less so for today’s. How does the play speak to us in the 21st century?It’s a play about wanting to have something to believe in. Faustus has discarded philosophy, law and eventually religion. He believes that he might have found something to believe in with black magic. He ends up with no hope or faith at all – in humanity, himself, anything. He’s left in a very bleak place, which is potentially an extreme version of the consequences of being an atheist. You have to face up to that absolute lack of faith – which can be quite a dark place to exist in. Of course, the play has a strong religious element to it, but it’s about more than that.

You’re currently expecting your first child. What more can the industry do to help those who work in the arts and have young children?It’s a terrifying prospect, to be honest. Trying to make it work is incredibly daunting. There’s just no support. I was at the launch of the Parents in Performing Arts campaign last year – they are doing amazing work. The scale of the problem is quite intimidating; it needs to change on so many levels. For freelancers, childcare is not tax-deductible – but something like having a chauffeur is. Something has to change there. More and more people are freelance, never mind in the arts, but in general. We have to adjust the system to allow for that. The cost of childcare pretty much cancels out what my partner and I will earn when we’re in rehearsals full-time – you’re really just paying for the privilege to work.

It feels as if the industry is beginning to have an important conversation about diversity in terms of both who is making shows and who is watching them. But there’s a long way to go isn’t there?Yes, where to start? Crikey, there’s the cost of going to drama school in the first place which excludes vast numbers of people – to the point where they don’t even bother trying because they know it’s going to be impossible. Then there’s the years after you graduate where you have to work for a long time for no money … It’s very hard. Even when you’re supposedly making a living in the arts, there’s the bleak time in January when you do your tax return and look at what you earn compared with the national average salary. It’s frightening. Cuts to the arts are going to exclude a huge amount of people – not just from making the work but also from participating in it as spectators. It’s just going to become more and more elitist and something that’s purely entertainment rather than something that has actual impact on society. It’s worrying.

Faustus sells his soul to the devil for 24 years of power and knowledge. If you were making a similar pact, what would you want?Having spent 12 weeks inside the play, living the consequences of making that pact, I’m not sure I’d make it for anything! I’d probably ask for a few extra years than Faustus. Yes, I’d have definitely upped the number. It’s one of the things that terrifies me the most in life – coming to the end of your time and feeling like you’re not quite done.